Thursday, 05 November 2009

  • notes on Babylon

              A man happens upon on a book on an unattended seat. Looking around to make sure it belongs to no one, he flips to a random page and reads: "Beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time." He reads this line, rereads it, memorizes it, includes it in his conversations, expounds on its applicative theories. Years later on his deathbed, he realizes that this is the only thing he has ever read and will ever read.
             We have things to tell one another, to talk, to converse, to discuss. Because death is silence and silence is the sum of all things already said and need not be spoken again.
             Knowing this, I think about railway lines that converge to split at a later point. On a train, a lady reaches deep into her shoe. She is trying to remove a burr that has been pressing into the side of her foot. She remembers it lodging itself there from a lone hike in the woods two years ago, never bothering to take it out until now. Therefore she is reaching into her own past, digging into the very recesses of her time-- first a finger, then her hand, her arm, her shoulder, her head, her whole body. She eventually disappears entirely into her shoe seeking a system of memory, a system of preservation.
             In her mind, a couple becomes intimate with each other with the singular purpose of producing progeny. Their children exist solely to replicate this act. The generations that follow imitate this and so on and so forth. Therefore the whole of their existences condenses into one act repeated into infinity, a single grain that can be taken also as a whole nugget capable of being disseminated as separate, dissimilar atoms.
             In an instance of one of these infinite acts, silence is a man at peace with himself. He recalls an old story of a husband who escapes his wife by falling asleep under a tree. In his waking dreams, he plays ninepins with the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew. Twenty years later, he awakens to find himself alone. Panicking, he begins to write a book on the architecture of sleep. He reads it forwards, then backwards. He starts in the middle and reads outward in two directions. He prints the letters inverted and skips every other word trying to retrace those lost years. What he reads is no longer a treatise on remembrance and the reappropriation of time. Instead, within the sequence of the new words, he finds that he has written a book on the proliferation of desert flowers, of the chuparosa, the verbena, the agave. Flipping to a random page and deciphering the now-unintelligible code, he tries to equate the scientific descriptions he finds to moments in history: the fall of ancient Babylon, the destruction of Persepolis, the exile of Juan Perón. He recalls a passage he once read somewhere but no longer remembers-- if beauty is the abolition of time or if chronology is the cause of our circumstance.


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